Apple Move To Intel Processors From 2006

June 11th, 2005 by Mark Rittman

I
guess the big news last week from a tech point of view was

Apple’s announcement that they were moving to Intel processors from 2006,
starting with the Mac Mini. It’s a decision that of course was particularly
interesting given the previous pronouncements that the PowerPC architecture
(with the Altivec enhancements) was architecturally superior to the Intel
architecture, and it’s an interesting turn of events for IBM as the major
customer for their PowerPC chips is now Microsoft with the XBox360. Funny how
things change.

I guess from an Oracle perspective it’s got to mean that support for Oracle
RDBMS running on OS X on the PowerPC architecture has got to be a lower priority
now, but with future Macs running on an Intel architecture perhaps Apple will
become a more mainstream/volume platform in the future - especially with OS X’s
Unix roots. From a personal perspective, I’ve always hankered after a Mac, but
have always stopped short of buying one because of the price premium. Apple’s
plans are apparently to use the standard Intel architecture but to add some
means by which you have to use Apple hardware to run OS X - perhaps by a special
BIOS chip that needs to be on the motherboard to enable OS X to boot; given the
speed with which Playstations and XBoxes were "modded" to allow unsigned code to
run, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that there were ways of "modding"
standard Intel architecture motherboards to allow OS X within a few weeks of
Intel-based Macs appearing. Another interesting thought is that these
Intel-based Macs will naturally allow Windows to run natively on them - you can
imagine a situation where a standard Dell PC costs 500 to buy, or you can buy
an Intel-based Mac for 800, which allows you to run OS X or Windows (or indeed
Linux or any other Intel-based OS). The final interesting thought is that this
is the obvious way that OS X will go 64-bit - the latest Pentium IVs have 64-bit
support and of course "Intel support" may instead be referring to a cheaper
version of the Itanium 64-bit processor. All very interesting stuff.

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Comments

  1. Andy Todd Says:

    June 13th, 2005 at 5:57 am

    Word on the street is that you won’t be able to run OS X on third party intel boxes, mainly because of the way that the graphics libraries are written. The core O/S (Darwin [1]) is already freely available and running on Wintel boxes. It is, after all, just a BSD derivative.
    This is why Oracle works on Mac OSX now, not because it’s a Power PC architecture but because at the system level it’s just another *nix version.
    I wouldn’t see this changing with the move to Intel as all that’s (allegedly) required for existing software to work on the new hardware is a different flag setting when calling gcc.
    As ever with Apple, it’s not particularly the hardware of software that makes it a good (some would say great) platform, it’s the combination of the two and the fact that stuff just works. [2]
    [1] http://developer.apple.com/darwin/
    [2] http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/494040.html
    http://www.halfcooked.com/mt/archives/000956.html